Poetry

V

Poetic Tradition

Such cross-fertilization takes place frequently in the arts, and poetry is no exception. Another example is recent North American poetry, which has been enriched by the Surrealist and associative techniques and revolutionary cast of poems by such Latin American poets as the Peruvian César Vallejo and the Chilean Pablo Neruda. Earlier cross-cultural influences include the impact of French on English poetry (not to mention that of the French language on Old English) in the wake of the Norman Conquest, of Chinese on Japanese over the centuries, and of Greek on Latin in the 3rd century bc.

Many poems have vanished over the millennia, either because they existed only in the oral tradition and were eventually forgotten, or because so many manuscripts disintegrated or were destroyed. Some of the destruction was by natural processes; some occurred in the wanton pillaging of libraries and centres of learning; and some—as in the case of one of history's greatest lyric poets, the Greek Sappho—because of bigotry. During the Christian era Sappho's writings were condemned to be burned, and only about 700 lines remain—saved because they were included in uncondemned anthologies, or were quoted by other writers whose works survived, or because Egyptian embalmers chanced to wrap their mummies with strips of papyrus on which her verses were written. Of some other Greek writers only the names survive, but not a line of poetry. Closer to the present, the Old English epic Beowulf, the most important poem extant from Anglo-Saxon England, exists in but one manuscript; indeed, from centuries of Old English alliterative poetry only five manuscripts are known to have survived. The invention of printing in the 15th century enormously improved the chances of a book's survival, and the technological advances of the 20th century in data storage and retrieval make it theoretically possible to preserve any poem. Compared with what is extant from the last 5,000 years, future generations of readers will have access to a tremendous quantity of verse from the past.

VI

The Origin of Poetry

Enough poetry has come down from ancient times, however, to suggest certain enduring aspects of poetic expression, whatever the time or culture. In Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions of about 2600 bc are found kinds of poetry (evidently songs, although only the text, not the music, is preserved) still familiar today: laments, odes, elegies, hymns. The many songs relating to religion (an emphasis true also of such other ancient poetries as Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, Hittite, and Hebrew) support the hypothesis that the origins of poetry can be found in the communal expression, probably originally taking the form of dance, of the religious spirit. Thus, the dance rhythm could be marked not only by clapping, stamping, or rhythmic cries, but by chanting or otherwise intoning or singing words. Song, then, became the progenitor of both poetry and instrumental music. Work songs (a type also found in Egyptian tomb inscriptions of the 3rd millennium bc), lullabies, play songs, and other songs accompanying rhythmic activity probably developed nearly simultaneously with religious songs. The ritual aspect of poetry is still evident in the songs of many native cultures, as in this Navajo incantation for rain, translated by the Irish-born American ethnologist Washington Matthews.

Not just lyric poetry but narrative verse as well may have had its origins in the religious impulse. The earliest narrative songs, or epics, tell the myths of creation and of the gods; later epics treat the lives of god-like heroes; and still later ones deal with the lives of historical heroes. The range is from the Babylonian creation myth and the Gilgamesh epic to the Greek Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, from the Indian Ramayana and Mahabharata to the medieval French Chanson de Roland and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. It is interesting that dramatic poetry was twice born in the West, both times in a religious context: first in ancient Greek festivals, then in medieval Church ritual (perhaps with the assistance of much older surviving folk rituals).

As the earliest examples of poetry make clear, however, such ritual origins were expanded on very early. Not all songs existed solely for the practical purposes of propitiating the gods, smoothing the course of the soul's voyage after death, assuring the outcome of a battle, or influencing natural phenomena (“The waters of the dark clouds drop, drop”). When the tradition of the sung poem yielded to the written tradition—that is, when words were selected and ordered apart from melodic needs—greater complexities of content, syntax, form, and sound became possible. At the other extreme from music, sound all but vanishes in the new emphasis on the visual, or written, aspect of poetry. (This is the particular province of concrete poetry, a contemporary graphic art that extends the millennia-old tradition of pattern poetry—verse that appears in shapes alluding to its subjects.) The typographical high jinks of the 20th-century American poet e. e. cummings provide particularly sophisticated and witty instances of the exploitation of the visual component of poetry. In his grasshopper poem (1935), for example, the scrambled spelling of the opening line (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) playfully mimics the erratic movements of the grasshopper.

VII

The Future of Poetry

Technological advances such as the computer may well change the shape of poetry, but not its importance, for poetry has shown itself to be as adaptable as any other art. While this is less obvious in restrictive societies, in which poetry may be perverted for propaganda purposes and where the best work often goes underground, the achievements of poets in many countries in the 20th century augur well for the future. Works by poets in Great Britain, the United States, and in Latin America and Spain—to mention only a few of the areas where poetry continues to flourish and evolve—testify to its durability. In Great Britain and the United States, numerous small magazines are devoted to publishing new poetry, many universities have a “poet-in-residence” on the faculty, and poetry readings by established and new writers are a feature of cultural life on and off campus.

For additional information, see articles on the types and forms of poetry and on poetic movements; see also biographies of individual poets and articles on national literatures.